essay

Selecting the 100 best books for men requires some audacity -- but so does hitting a good tee shot or giving a toast, and we like those things fine. We figured the best way to do an honest job of it was to imagine ourselves as audience members: What do we want to read? The answer we discovered, after some hemming and hawing, was simply something we'll enjoy.
So that’s what we did. Our 100 selections are our all-time favorites -- albeit considered in the light of how much they changed our lives, and might change yours -- and each of the six “auditors” had a general (but not universal) slant. Our car editor loved motorcycle manuals and top-tier action novels. Our watch and diver fanatic loved tales of true survival. One co-founder was into age-of-thought-shifting sci-fi. I had a definite classics fetish.
Ultimately, we realized that each of our individual favorites made up an extremely wide range of suggestions. And really, on a very large scale, that’s what a library is. Sure, we have an immense amount of room to go, and some incredible literature has been missed. But we’ve also hit at least a small corner of what most might consider the “core readings”; and, sticking to our previously mentioned “read what you like” rule, there have to be at least a few you’ll truly enjoy.

Someone once said that writing about music is like dancing about architecture. But while I’m sure music critics have their own challenges, I suspect they have an easier time explaining what they do than we watch writers, who fetishize the arcane minutiae of an anachronistic art. But I’ve learned to respond to questions about my...